Meunik: Rethinking Virtual Machine Memory Resource Management for Unikernel-Based VMs

In this paper, we investigate the problem of achieving efficient memory resource management for unikernel-based virtual machines (uVMs), where unikernels are running as the operating systems of the VMs. Through extensive experiments, we first demonstrate that existing VM memory management mechanisms are unsuitable for uVMs. Then, we propose MEUNIK, a system that aims to achieve high memory management efficiency or uVMs. The four key mechanisms of MEUNIK are designed to address the problems we find in existing solutions. We have implemented a prototype MEUNIK system based on the Xen hypervisor and performed extensive evaluation experiments on three groups of uVMs, which are constructed based on a variety of programs and applications, including fifteen small benchmark programs, four complex server applications, and two network-operation-heavy programs. The evaluation results show that our system achieves the design goals with minimal overhead.